The Cholera Years

A history of the nineteenth-century epidemic and a “skillful, absorbing presentation of the background and the effects of this dread disease” (The New York Times).   Cholera was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as the plague had been for the fourteenth. Its defeat was a reflection not only of progress in medical knowledge but of enduring changes in American social thought. In this book Charles Rosenberg has focused his study on New York City, the most highly developed center of this new society. Carefully documented, full of descriptive detail, yet written with an urgent sense of the drama of the epidemic years, this narrative is as absorbing for general audiences as it is for the medical historian. In a new afterword, Rosenberg also discusses changes in historical method and concerns since the original publication of The Cholera Years. “A major work of interpretation of medical and social thought.”—I.B. Cohen, The New York Times “A masterful analysis.”—Steven Shapin, Times Literary Supplement “In a way that is all too rarely done, Rosenberg has skillfully interwoven medical, social, and intellectual history to show how medicine and society interacted and changed during the 19th century. The history of medicine here takes its rightful place in the tapestry of human history.”—John B. Blake, Science